Tripping the Inner Snack-Sensor

Prices recently changed in the vending machines at work, and nothing makes much sense anymore. The Big Grab potato chips (a sack large enough to please even me) cost just 75 cents, for instance. But regular Reese’s (or as they’re called back home: Reesey Cups) are $1.10.

My inner snack-sensor says those prices should be flip-flopped. Don’t you think? A normal candy bar should not be so expensive, and a family-sized serving of chips shouldn’t be so cheap.

As I was standing there contemplating this most pressing of issues, I started thinking about work vending machines in general…

The company that maintains ours also maintained the ones at my previous job. So, it’s all very familiar; the lineup never really changes.

We’ve got two fancy-pants Coke machines, with buttons the size of dinner plates. They offer what you’d expect, plus bottled water, and several (often mysterious) varieties of iced tea.

There are also two non-affiliated soda machines, with full plexiglass fronts. These are loaded-up with all manner of drinkables. There’s Pepsi products, milk (both white and brown), iced tea from a local “farm,” Mexican soda with dragons on the labels, etc. etc.

The chocolate milk is a major roll of the dice. Sometimes it’s fresh and delicious, and other times a little light chewing is required. The secret is in the chunks! One guy was having a bottle one night and I thought I heard crunching. But I could be wrong.

And there’s almost never a Dr. Pepper to be found in that cold beverage dumping ground, so when one appears it’s immediately snagged. Whether the person wants a Dr. Pepper, or not… Then they prance around, wearing a big shit-eater, and singing, “Look what I got!”

There are also two snack machines, with the aforementioned pricing. Chips and chips-related items are at the top, cookies and candy bars are in the middle, and large pastry-style things are at the bottom. It’s a logical set-up, I guess, but not completely.

Lorna Doone, for instance, cannot withstand a fall from the middle shelves of that machine. The two cookies that absorb the brunt of impact almost always turn to dust. And if the package happens to land on its side, well… you might as well just throw it in the trash.

Unless, of course, you’re interested in rolling up a hundred dollar bill and snorting a line of shortbread.

At the very bottom is an assortment of terrible Life Savers knock-offs, for seventy cents each. I once bought a roll of the five flavors, and it was just one solid column of candy. All the pieces were sealed together, and I had to peel and eat the thing like a banana. Pitiful.

They also try to pass-off what looks like premium Hostess snack cakes from a distance, but are actually something called Mrs. Freshley. I once made the mistake of purchasing the cupcakes, and it tasted like two car washing sponges with a creamy bathtub cleaner filling.

Actual high quality candy bars are available in these machines, but they’re $1.10. Sometimes I have an inexplicable craving for a Hershey bar with almonds, like a filthy dumplin’ child in 1945 Berlin, and agonize about whether or not to spend the money. Usually I can’t go through with it, but am perfectly able to justify it in a true emergency situation.

There are also two machines I’ve never used. One purportedly sells ice cream bars, but I haven’t witnessed a single person buying anything from it. I imagine everything is radically freezer-burned, with wrappers that say, “Win a trip to the 2006 Grammy Awards!”

Then there’s the machine folks have dubbed the “wheel of death.” It features rotating shelves, with little compartments containing pre-made sandwiches, microwavable burritos and hot dogs, and the like. People who forgot to pack a lunch are often seen standing in front of it, engaging the flywheel, and looking sad and hopeless.

I’ve never bought anything from the wheel of death, but when I first started working there, a guy told me, “NEVER buy a salad from that machine on a Friday. Seriously, you need to trust me on this…” Heh.

On the other hand, one of my co-workers swears by something called the Big Azz chicken sandwich. He insists it’s really good, but I don’t know anything about it. All I know is, it’s one of only two commercially available food items with profanity in its name, that I’m aware of. The other is Heluva Good dip. Are there others?

When it gets right down to it, the vending machines at my job are fairly standard and dull. Does your place offer anything more interesting, in the world of coin-operated food dispensers?

Tell me about it, so I can live vicariously through your better situation.

And before I call it a day here, check out this mind-blowing Smoking Fish sighting. Siberia! How cool is that? Probably very cool, huh? Keep ’em coming, folks! Our logo, man, he gets around.

I worked at a health insurance company, briefly, which only provided healthy options in its vending machines and cafeterias. Nothing but diet soda on the entire campus and only “healthy” vending machine snacks, including imitation cardboard cookies. Bringing cake for birthday parties was discouraged. The reasoning behind the idea is sound, but ginger snaps are not a suitable stand-in for Chips Ahoy during an afternoon sugar craving.

I would gladly have paid $1.10 for chocolate while I was there, although in any other setting it is obscene.

Waay back in the early 1990’s i worked at a construciton company in south Seattle, where there was something called an “honor bar”, which sold all manner of tasty snacks ranging in price from 25 cents to a dollar. Again – construction company….Honor bar
The first day it was wiped out, and there was exactly 25 cents in the little mail slot where one was supposed to pay. When the lady came to restock the next day, she was near tears upon discovering the “cash”, so i paid her out of the petty cash box, and she fully restocked,
The restocked items may not have made it until she left the parking lot.

I use to work for a major dishwasher manufacturer and they had a cafeteria. It was a hit or miss situation. Some days the food was freakin awesome with very cheap prices and other days it would be nasty with crazy high prices. I was in heaven when I got switched to 3rd shift. They would serve breakfast for our “lunch.” I would order a pancake that was as large as a dinner plate for a mere 65 cents. A hot tea or coffee from the machine would be 50 cents and for little over a dollar I would be stuffed. This was a few years ago and my sources tell me they haven’t raised the prices still. I now know why a bunch of 1st shifters would come to work early and eat breakfast. You can’t make it that cheap.

My hubby has a similar setup to you Jeff. They also have the “wheel of death” and has a similar name for it. They also have a shortage of Dr. Pepper. For some reason they only have 1 slot for it and the guy only stocks it once a week. That and OJ is in high demand at his work place. Also they have 2 microwaves. One that works half-assed and the other that can’t bring your food past room temp. But they offer no sink or drinking fountain. Isn’t that odd?? Or do other work places try to force you to purchase water?

I don’t have any prize vending machine tales, but I do have a friend who has worked for many years for a company that provides those snack trays often seen in the darkest corners of car repair bays, teacher lounges, and other such glamorous locations.

In 21st century America, it’s something that still operates on the ‘honor system,’ so I’m constantly amazed they’ve gone another year without going out of business. (Dave in Seattle’s report is more what I expect to happen.)

And Tammie, one of the highest joys of my young life was surgically dismantling and eating frozen Ring Dings, one layer at a time, from the outside in.

The “Wheel of Death” was the greatest thing ever (at least in my late teens/early 20s)! The company who did the vending at my old job was “Jackson Brothers”, so we used to call that machine the “Jackson Bros. Rotisserie Special” or some such nonsense. Fantastic. Thanks for helping me recall such great memories.

No vending machines at work – only a crappy restaurant. But I was at a ski lodge once near Ottawa that had a vending machine that made frenchfries right before your very eyes. You put your money in and watched while the frozen chips were dumped into a little boiling pot of oil, cooked, drained and then served into your little paper cup. And they were damn good!

i know those lifesaver fakes of which you speak. they are up there in vending unholiness with beech nut gum.

my office has a wheel of death, but it has it’s moments. you can get those individual cereal bowls from it, and you can trust the milk for the most part.

and i LOVE those ice cream machines. i remember them from childhood at the science museum. it was like freedom for 65 cents in the shape of an ice cream sandwich. your mom wasn’t there to say things like “we have ice cream sandwiches at home!”

I used to buy all the “apple uglies” from the machine located in my barracks in camp lejeune in the late nineties. No one else stood a chance. They were made by the company mentioned earlier “ho maid snacks”.
They changed the name to “home made snacks around 2000. I wish I would have kept one of the wrappers. It always made me laugh as I ate them. When I went to Okinawa the drink machines had 3 different brands of beer for $1 each.
I never bought any but many of my friends, mostly underage guys, did.